Child Abuse Cases, Baby P and Sharon Shoesmith
I’m not going to comment on the recent judgement in Sharon Shoesmith’s appeal, as it would appear that we have all sorts of groups and interests colliding in a Court of Law, with everybody claiming the moral highground.
I have just looked at the timeline of the tragic case at the centre of it all, Baby P. As I thought he died a few months before my late wife, C.
I can remember discussing this case in particular and many others in general with C over the years.
She often despaired at the ineptitude and sometimes downright indifference of some social workers and police and sometimes suffered mentally, as she tried to sort it all out as a barrister. Not that she did many cases as tragic as Baby P. She always said that she was lucky and could come home with a clear conscience,unlike many front-line workers. Not that she didn’t worry about some of the really bad cases she handled.
She would have argued that a lot of the problems were down to constant changes in the law, with large amounts of retraining, were cutting the efficiency of the very services, the changes were trying to improve. She would always tell stories about how she’d been involved where yet another baby had been taken into care from an abusive family. Some families were costing Social Services hundreds of thousands of pounds a year.
So now that money to these services is being cut, staff are further stressed and we have well-meaning politicians shoving their oar in, I think it unlikely we’ll see much improvement in the next few years.
The Anonymous Widower 
I worked for social services for a short while, and was horrified at the pressure the social workers there were under. Not only is their more paperwork cutting time with clients, fewer admin staff meaning social workers are doing work that shouldnt have to do – typing reports etc, but the public are more aware and report things to social services far more than perhaps 10 or 15 years ago, alnd although they people are reporting with all good intentions, often what they are reporting is in fact very trivial and not relevant to social services. But social workers have to follow up each one.
PLus they cant win, we had all sorts of publicity about “nasty sociual workers taking children from families” and then we had “inept social workers leaving children with families”.
Comment by liz | May 28, 2011 |
C would have agreed.
Comment by AnonW | May 28, 2011 |
I wish more people were aware of the real issues. Whilst there is often too much paperwork, cutting down on admin staff makes it worse not better. Schools and hospitals have the same problems.
The people who really make me cross though are those who say the NHS should get rid of “the administrators” and put the doctors in charge of the hospitals. The NHS would collapse within a month – it would probably even go bankrupt. My experience tells me that people become doctors to cure people. And a great many of them dont know when to say that a particular patient isnt responding to treatment, and the time has come for them to recieve excellent palliative care. Giving chemo to frail elderly people in their late 80s and 90s with metastatic cancer is wrong from both a humane point of view and a resources point of view. The treatment will probably kill the patient!
That is an extreme example, but there are many other decisions made in all areas of medicine which are made for reasons which are hard to understand.
Comment by liz | May 28, 2011 |
A lot of it is the nature of the admin. Systems ciuld be so much better in many instances. In my view the lack of good databases is often the problem, so for instance information for last week’s test are not on your patient record, when you go back to the hospital. We should be able to walk into any doctors, pharmacy or hospital and instantly they should be able to pull up our details. And that should be worldwide! Many doctors I’ve been to lately work alone and do all the tests themselves, including my cardiologist. He just works with a secretary to sort out his admin. With modern technology, everything should be much simpler and often it’s nurses and technitians that are not needed. I had a scan for my bones and that was just me and the radiologist, who worked in a pair on two machines doing two patients at a time with just one sdministrator. Very efficient and it showed why hospitals must be bigger not local.
I agree with you about cancer treatment. My cardiologist was also my wife’s and because of her age, they tried something that might work as a last resort. It didn’t and I’ll doubt they’ll use that drug again. But if ever there was an inoperable and untreatable cancer it was C’s.
Comment by AnonW | May 28, 2011 |
Some of the computer systems are awful, and really difficult to use unless you are comfortable around computers. I was okay and picked it up easily when I was with Social Services, but some of the staff really struggled, and probably made errors through no fault of their own.
The system in use by many education authorities was was also bad. Plus, you had to be employed by the LEA in a school as an admin officer to be allowed on the training sessions run by the software providers. I think heads could go on the courses too. I was chair of governors of a school, and our admin was off sick. The budget was very tight anyway, and getting temps was impossible because they didnt know how to use the system. I went into the school every morning on an unpaid basis to deal with post, registers etc. Just for a couple of hours. The poor head had to do the stuff which required using the software, although he did show me some basic bits.
Comment by liz | May 28, 2011 |
I’ve been involved in management software for fifty years. Much of the stuff I’ve seen is terrible and I would be very embarrassed to have written. The trouble with many government systems is that they do them on the cheap and employ the same big consultats all the time. It was once said by someone who knew what he was talking about that if it takes one man a year to write a ciomputer system, it will take two men, two years and 256 men, 256 years. Also civil servants don’t like paying a guy a lot more than what they are earning. And if you don’t pay that price, you get an idiot.
Comment by AnonW | May 28, 2011 |
There are consultants who would have pushed various different trials and treatments at your wife because their ethos was to “cure” everyone, and if a patient died they felt they had failed in that aim.
You are well educated and understand your rights. There are many patients who really dont realise that they have the right to refuse treatments and trials.
Comment by liz | May 28, 2011 |